Free Last Respects by Jerome Weidman Page A

century ago, it could be half a world. To a boy, anyway. At that time the Lower East Side was not so much a crisscrossed network of streets and blocks, as it was a cluster of different villages with totally different populations.
    Ninth Street was almost exclusively Italian. I remember the feeling, on that first morning when I walked up to J.H.S. 64, that I had entered a strange country. It was. I had never known any Italians. Naturally, I was worried. My concern was short-lived. Aside from the fact that they bought strange foods displayed in store windows that did not look like Mr. Deutsch’s grocery on our block or Mr. Shumansky’s chicken store on the Avenue C corner, the Italians of Ninth Street seemed after a few days no different from the Hungarians and Austrians of my block. In relation to me, that is. They didn’t seem to know I was alive. This suited me fine. I didn’t want anybody staring at me during the settling-in process. This process ended the day my teacher announced that Mr. O’Hare, the scoutmaster of a newly formed scout troop, was looking for recruits, and any boy interested in joining could meet Mr. O’Hare for a talk after school in the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House around the corner on Avenue B.
    I had, of course, belonged to Troop 224 for about two years in the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library until the scoutmaster died and the troop disintegrated. I missed it. I welcomed this opportunity to become involved again with knot-tying and Morse Code. Once more my mother pretended she was unaware of my involvement in the scout movement. She was dedicated to this pretense with a fierceness that still impresses me. Look at the things she had to pretend she did not see. The signaling flags I brought into the house. The flint-and-steel sets. The knot-tying equipment. The merit badge pamphlets and other technical literature that began to appear after supper on our kitchen table along with my schoolbooks when I was supposed to be doing my homework. My mother never saw any of it. She was determined not to see any of it. She laundered that uniform for me every Friday. She pressed it. She removed grease spots from the breeches with Carbona. She sewed my insignia and, as I earned them, my merit badges on the shirt. She did all that, but she never acknowledged the fact that her son disappeared every Saturday night at six o’clock wearing a khaki uniform and did not come home until almost midnight.
    Looking back on it, the only thing that seems strange to me about the whole business is that I did not find it strange. Some instinct told me it was crucial to my mother’s existence for her not to acknowledge my participation in any life outside her own orbit. Out of this same instinct came my total acceptance of the structure she had created, as well as my skill at maintaining my role in it.
    That is why I could not believe my eyes on the night when I wigwagged twenty-five words with a single red and white Morse flag across the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House in two minutes and ten seconds flat.
    “Come on!” Chink Alberg barked from somewhere down near my left knee. “All I got is u, n, t, o!” I didn’t answer. I was staring with astonished disbelief at my mother’s figure at the other side of the gym. “For Christ’s sake!” Chink yelled. “What the hellzamatter with you?”
    “It’s my mother,” I said.
    “To hell with your mother,” Chink snarled. “Start calling, for Christ’s sake. Them other bastids, they’re getting ahead of us!”
    I was aware of this. I could see George Weitz at the other side of the gym. His flag was whipping left and right. I could see Hot Cakes Rabinowitz kneeling to the left of George, calling the letters from his clipboard. I could even see the four rival teams, two on each side of George and Hot Cakes, wigwagging away like crazy, wiping out the lead I had gained with my two minutes ten, and pulling ahead. But I saw them all